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7 Steps to Design SEO Strategy to Increase Search Traffic

A good wish can never push your rankings to the top of organic listings—you need a strategy.

Of course, it feels good to be on the first page of Google. But more than that, you also get 95% more organic traffic. Statistics show that organic results get as much as 95% search traffic while ads only receive 5% traffic.

Only a powerful SEO strategy can help you drive massive search traffic. Ads don’t stand a chance.

In the rest of this in-depth article, I’ll show you the 7-step process you need when designing your SEO strategy. For further detailed information on the content below feel free to check out blogs from a preeminent SEO company in Atlanta (if you live in the Southeast) such as Cardinal or Click Ready Marketing.

Let’s get right in…

1. Define your goals

Every strategy starts with defining clear objectives and goals. Your SEO strategy should not be different. Ask yourself this basic question:

What do I want to achieve at the end of the day?

In this case, your goal is to increase search traffic, fine. But how much traffic do you need?

Do you need 100 daily visitors?

Do you need 100K monthly visitors?

Do you want to increase organic traffic by 50%?

Define clear goals. Increase in search traffic is not an effective goal. You won’t be able to measure the progress of your goal because even if you get 5 new visitors a week that will count as an increase in search traffic.

You can find long-tail keywords at the end of the Google search results page. These related searches give you a nice idea of what people are actually searching for and what keywords they use.

3. Identify competitors

Google Keyword Planner and other third-party tools can give you tens of thousands of keywords. However, choosing the right keywords for your campaign can be challenging at times.

That’s where your competitors can help you.

Identify your top 5 competitors from search results pages. Websites that rank over and over for most of the chosen keywords are your primary competitors.

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can see what they are doing and what keywords they are targeting. You can do so with the help of SpyFu.

Enter the URL of your competitor and hit “Enter” on your keyboard.

Click SEO Keywords to see the complete list of keywords your competitor is targeting.

You can choose keywords that your competitors are targeting.

Repeat same for all the other four competitors and refine your target keywords accordingly.

4. Create content

It’s time to create content based on your keywords, while addressing the “user intent” for that given keyword.

If you want to rank for any keyword, write the best content on the same keyword— better than your competitors.

Rand Fishkin calls it “10x content.” And Sonia Thompson gives the steps to make it epic.

Don’t take shortcuts when creating your content. Scraped or fluff content won’t take you far. This is what everyone else is doing out there. You have to spend time in research, sourcing credible data, and producing irresistible content.

I personally love storytelling for content creation since it has the magic to turn the tables. Alibaba started using storytelling in 2012 and that’s where it turned out to be a massive hit.

Other techniques to blow your readers with content include:

Long-form content

Data-driven content

Case studies

Guides and how-to articles

Infographics

Statistics

Videos and podcasts

You don’t have to focus too much on quantity of the articles you write but on quality. A single awesome blog post a month is far better than 10 sub-standard blog posts a month.